This sort of thing leaves me speechless:

Some attendees clearly resented the Republicans who came in from all over the country to attend the official inauguration balls.



“There’s this Republican head-in-the-clouds mentality – we just want to have a good time, because we gave a lot of money to the Republican National Committee,” said Denise Ross, 31, of Arlington, Va.



She also lambasted their fashion sense, recalling seeing women in open-toe sandals and fur coats.

If it were just Denise Ross, 31, of Arlington, VA, who thought this way, I wouldn’t mind so much; but it’s not. She crystallizes an entire mentality, so just in case any of her fellow-feelers happen to wander by here, I’d like to set a thing or two straight:



Americans love Washington because the great temples of our republic are there. We know that it houses plenty of dedicated public servants who focus more on the service than on the public, and we’re grateful to them.



Let’s be clear, though: DC and its environs are a cultural backwater, a fact known around the world. For every self-abnegating true-believer–unshowy and discreet–you encounter what seems like a dozen smug types who appear to have come to Washington in the belief that simply being close to the Center of Power lends profound importance to their every memo, meeting, and trip to the bathroom. Yes, New York and Los Angeles have their obnoxious superiority complexes, too–New York’s in its general where-it’s-at-ness, and LA’s in its inescapable talk about “the Industry.” But those cities also exalt the transformative power of the imagination. That’s more obviously true of LA, which creates movies full of make-believe, but it also inheres in New York’s advertising and investment banking, which fund and publicize people’s dream projects and test whether they have a receptive audience in which to flourish.



Washington’s magnetism, in the age of lobbies and lawyers for everything, comes from the flat, decidedly un-dreamlike coercive power of legislation and regulation. LA attracts people who want to rule the public by becoming stars and capturing their hearts; Washington attracts people who literally want to be involved in making the rules that boss people around. (And, obviously, while I’m saying “DC” and “Washington,” I’m referring equally to Fairfax County and southern Maryland.)



And–make me barf!–that goes quadruple for style. How dare anyone in that metro area criticize other people’s fashion sense! This is the place where every outfit is chosen to make sure it can’t offend the sensibilities of someone whose ass might need kissing. J. Press mannequins are dressed with more flair, idiosyncratic confidence, and presence than I’ve ever seen on a Washingtonian.



As for fur coats with open-toed shoes…well, that’s not an obvious combination. I can see it being pulled off with ease, though, by a lady of a certain age. She would have had to keep her bosom and legs presentable, and to have relaxed into herself enough to be stouter than she was as a girl. And she’d need a positively obscene number of diamonds–drop earrings, clearly, if not chandeliers. But why not? Inauguration day only comes once every four years, and a more self-critical soul than Ms. Ross might have a chance to learn there are clothiers in the world besides Talbots.



*******



And finally, check out the accompanying picture of Barney Frank. Will the man never learn not to assume that deadly petulant expression in front of the camera? He looks like he went to his plastic surgeon and said, “I was hoping we could do sort of a Barbara Mikulski thing….”

Why do ads targeted at gay men always have to feature shirtless kouros figures, ask Michael and Chris? (It was especially fun to read this complaint on a blog called “boy’s briefs” with a masthead photograph of a few hundred shirtless men milling around in the sun.)



I think part of it has to do with the kind of advertising they’re looking at. I don’t exactly make a habit of reading Out or The Advocate (or, if it’s still around, Genre) when I’m back in the States–all that contemptuous muttering tends to make people at surrounding tables look up from their coffee–but you see plenty of ordinary ads there with properly clothed people.



Unsolicited mail and cheapo ads tucked in 2″ X 2″ boxes on back pages are placed by different companies. They target not “gay men” in general but the lowest common denominator–by which I mean both the types of guys who organize their entire lives around making pick-ups and the sucker in all of us who falls for non-reasoning that says, “Buying XYZ will unleash pleasures akin to having a romp with that muffin there in the picture.” It’s not as if you didn’t see farm and automotive equipment being pitched to straight men with pictures of busty women in bikinis and pink workgloves, too.



Personally, I find these things tedious more for (warning: old, tired complaint ahead) the homogeneity of the men than for anything else. Back in the Calvin Klein bus ad era, the N’aired chests and improbably defined muscles were allusive and stimulating. I still remember smiling up at the giant Samsung ad (with the brawny man with a microwave under his arm) across from Port Authority whenever I came back to New York from home a decade ago. Now that every picture of a gay guy outside Honcho looks like that–usually showing the face with a bland Ken doll expression, too–it’s played out and enervating. Seeing a guy with a jaw full of whiskers and a chest resurfaced to look like vinyl, my first thought these days is less like Mmmm! and more like I hope you keep your nails trimmed, ’cause you are gonna be feelin’ the itch day after tomorrow, honey!

It’s been understood for a few months that Howard Baker will be stepping down as US Ambassador to Japan (although the post may officially be designated something “Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s”-ish–I’m not sure). His successor, announced on the day of President Bush’s inauguration, will be current Ambassador to Australia (“Ambassador to the Kangaroo Court,” maybe? I kill me sometimes, I just kill me) Thomas Schieffer.



His official biography is here. He’s the brother of Bob Schieffer, the CNN reporter. Bet their family dinners are interesting! His given name is also John Thomas, though he has the good sense to go by “Tom.” And, I assume, not to have married a lady named Jane.



The Nikkei says that many credit Schieffer with building a close, trusting relationship with John Howard during his tenure in Australia. That’s nice, but one is left wondering…well, what The Japan Times wonders:

Some experts have voiced concern over Schieffer’s lack of involvement in U.S.-Japan affairs and his relative lack of political clout in comparison with former envoys to Japan.



Baker was a Senate majority leader, while his predecessor was former House of Representatives Speaker Thomas Foley. Among the other political heavyweights who have filled the Tokyo post in the past is former Vice President Walter Mondale.



But other experts say that political background is not the only factor that determines the selection of an ambassador. In Schieffer’s case, his close ties with Bush make it easier to report directly to the president and to get White House policies reflected in diplomatic undertakings in Japan, they said.



A Republican congressional source said the appointment signals that the Bush administration’s policy of prioritizing ties with Japan will stay intact, with Schieffer expected to be the president’s closest ambassador. The Republican-controlled Senate is expected to confirm his nomination.

Well, okay. Given the deep-rooted cronyism in Japan, I suppose Tokyo can’t feel slighted by having Baker replaced by a long-time friend of Bush’s. (Schieffer was one of his partners in the ownership and development of the Texas Rangers.) Also, given the famed closeness between Bush and Koizumi themselves, Schieffer seems unlikely to have to work with Japanese bureaucrats to smooth over friction created between their heads of state.



Even so, Japan is in a delicate spot right now. No one disputes that the US is its most important ally, but plenty of people dispute the means by which mutual support is given: the US bases here, especially since the announcement that our forces worldwide will be redistributed; the SDF deployed in a non-combat capacity in Iraq; the petition to make Japan a permanent member of the UN Security Council, with the attendant debate over revising Article 9 of the constitution.



Given that context, and given that Baker hasn’t left office, it isn’t yet possible to know whether Schieffer’s way of being close to the power center–through intimacy rather than through career-earned clout–will be helpful to the Bush and Koizumi administrations. It appears to have worked in Australia, but Australia does not have the self-image of being impossible for uninitiated foreigners to understand that Japan does. We’ll see. In the meantime, best wishes to Howard Baker, who does not have loads of presence as a personality but, from what I’ve seen, was unshowy, workmanlike, and gentlemanly in going about his duties.

Happy fourth anniversary, Atsushi.

Since Atsushi will see this site before I talk to him tomorrow, and since we won’t actually get to see each other until next week, I’m going to put a picture up, temporarily. Of me, I mean. I mean, the picture will be of me until I age to the point that it doesn’t resemble me, but it’ll be up temporarily. For reasons that will be clear from the next post.

Right Side of the Rainbow is understandably pissy about the face-value content of this Reuters article:

Mistrust also runs deep among ordinary people. Some 58 percent of people surveyed in a British Broadcasting Corporation poll in 21 countries said they believed Bush’s re-election made the world a more dangerous place.



“Negative feelings about Bush are high,” Steven Kull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes which carried out the study, told the BBC. “This is quite a grim picture for the United States.”



People in three countries surveyed — Poland, India and the Philippines — said the world was now safer, while Israel, which was not part of the survey, also remains a big supporter of the 58-year-old president who took office four years ago.

I don’t know that I would take it at face value, though. I mean, when an individual is quoted, you kind of have to assume he means what he says:

“I think 2005 should mark a new start in our relations … based on listening to each other, having a more regular dialogue and mutual respect,” French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier said last week, reflecting the view of the European Union.

Bureaucrat endorses useless hen-party approach to politics? Okay, I believe him. But 58% of people over 21 countries leaves a lot of room for country-by-country aberrations, and the data themselves are not linked by Reuters. They are, however, on the Program for International Policy Attitudes’ website, here. Japan’s results mesh with those derived from an Asahi poll before the election.



The reason I’m cautious about interpreting the BBC poll as a Major Statement is not that I don’t want to believe it. (I don’t know whether 58% is the number, but overall, I do think Bush probably has more opponents than supporters in the global population.) Nor is it even just that polls are notoriously squishy. It’s just that, given that the way the non-US media covered Kerry’s campaign–a modern family man with an outspoken wife, anti-war beliefs, and Democratic Party affiliation just like our buddy Clinton!–a “Yes” to “Has Bush’s reelection made the world a more dangerous place?” could imply a range of things.



My experience is obviously not unbiased, but I know plenty of people who think both Bush and Kerry were unappetizing choices but saw mostly evidence that Kerry was the better option. (Tokyo being a transportation hub, I’m not just talking about Japanese, either.) And those are the people who are even exposed to media outlets from a variety of sources. Who knows what the rank-and-file population saw that sculpted their ideas?



IOW, I’m not ready to give up on the rest of the world just yet. I wish people had more sense of urgency about the WOT, certainly; but minds change slowly, especially in places where de facto state control of the news media is a constant reality.



In the meantime, the inauguration is today, no matter what anyone else thinks of it. Congratulations to President Bush and the rest of America.

Good news! It’s safe to eat again. The FDA has released its revised food pyramid, designed to make sure that even we stupid non-dieticians can somehow manage to keep body and soul together. Naturally, the CSPI has reacted with a degree of worshipful pyramidiocy that would embarrass J.Z. Knight:

CSPI Applauds New Dietary Recommendations



Calls for New Government Campaigns to Implement Them



…



Importantly, the guidelines apply to the federal school lunch and breakfast programs. Under the new Guidelines, schools will need to offer less-salty foods and more fruits, vegetables and whole grains.

This puts me in mind of something that happened my freshman year in college. Someone–the Vice-Provost of University Life, or the Greek Council, or some bored Trustees–decided that people were (be sure you’re sitting down for this) drinking too much at frat parties. The solution? Force the frats to offer non-salty snacks. Yes way! My roommate had joined one of the few funky-renegade fraternities on campus; it decided to offer non-salty snacks in the form of lettuce (plunked as-is into a serving dish with hilarious, baleful irony) and jello (not finger jello, just a bowl of jello with no utensils). I don’t remember the others.



Of course, if the CSPI has its way, publicly treating the new food pyramid with playful irreverence will probably be a felony before long:

To support the guidelines

This post is addressing the several people who have asked me what they can do to learn Japanese, under the flattering assumption that I have useful information to give them. That I am addressing those people will not be very clear for the first few paragraphs, so I’m going to ask in advance for everyone to bear with me. Then, too, if you can’t bear with me for a few paragraphs before figuring out what the topic of the post you’re reading is…not to be rude, but…WTF are you doing coming back here?

Anyway. Connie du Toit recently posted a half-mischievous-half-serious set of new categories for websites in this general -osphere that, she contends, aren’t blogs in the strictest sense. In it, she gives valentines to all her blog friends, and what’s touching about them is that she’s the sort of woman who doesn’t give praise she doesn’t mean. The section about me–no, I’m not going to quote it; linking it is quite sufficient as a gesture of fatuous self-regard–is something I’m very grateful for, but it’s a little frightening, too. I say that because she pretty much hits all my specific points of vanity; what she wrote is the way I’d describe myself if I had the cheek to believe it’s actually true. I mean, it was spooky.

One thing she called me was an expert in the Japanese language. Now, I don’t think any linguist (or Japanese person) would agree. I mean, my Japanese is good. Considering that a lot of foreigners here are content to learn what they need to pick up guys (or girls, you know, if that’s their thing), it’s not really hard to distinguish yourself that way. And I’ve lived here for a quarter of my life by now.

However, the real reason is that I had fantastic teachers all the way through. Because my parents were willing to take out parent loans instead of telling me I could jolly well work my way through college if I wanted to go, I was able to loll about for four years at Penn, with only a work-study job (10 hours a week) to distract me from studying. Yes, I amused myself thoroughly, too, but I had the time and reserves of mental and physical energy to study. Having grown up around people who worked themselves to the bone, physically, I found this a new environment; and I really liked most of my classes, so I did the work gladly. The Japanese program was wonderful, taught mostly by native Japanese speakers who developed their own companion materials to go with Eleanor Jorden’s books, which are classics in their way but are based on some implausible ideas about language acquisition. My mentor on the Japanese side of my comp. lit. degree was just fantastic as an advisor, reticent in that Japanophile way but also willing to express himself with clarity and point when necessary.

Where I ran into problems was during junior year. It was the worst year of my life, and I probably should have taken a year off to get myself together and resigned myself to being graduated late. But my grants and loans had already come through, and I’d spent the first two years piling on the courses, so I was able to take most things pass-fail and muddle through without disgracing myself (in schoolwork terms) or falling behind. I took fall semester of senior year to study abroad in London–it’s becoming clear that I’m the most pampered son of a steelworker there ever was, huh? I wasn’t able to take Japanese there, so I got the packets from the professor back home, and I worked through them and was able to enter second semester.

My assumption all along had been that I’d go to grad school. It wasn’t just like, I woke up the summer after junior year, realized I hadn’t learned anything marketable, and it was either a PhD program or law school. I was excited about becoming a professor. I loved Japanese literature; I read it for fun. Get paid to think and teach about it? Hell, yeah. I went to the place that gave me the most funding, a program that’s known for being really demanding.

And WHAM! I hit a wall. See, for the last two years, I’d been getting by in my Japanese classes on my ability to memorize. It wasn’t that I hadn’t been trying, but I’d been distracted, so I’d focused my energies on getting through the next kanji quiz, the next sentence pattern test, the next translation assignment. I wasn’t lazy, and I deserved my A’s on the finals–I mean, I’d gotten most of the questions right. But the thing is, I was only really putting my heart into learning the hard stuff: the tricky two-part sentence structures, the gajillion-stroke kanji, the names of obscure little plants mentioned in poems. After the placement test and some trial and error, I was assigned to second-year Japanese.

That’s second-year Japanese. As in, with the college sophomores. It is clear, is it not, that this site is generated by someone of no mean ego. Well, let me tell you, I was unutterably humiliated. Just ABJECT. This sort of thing DID NOT happen to me when it came to coursework. Now, everyone–the Japanese teacher, my mentor, the professors teaching my literature classes–fell all over himself to tell me that my talent as a critic wasn’t in question, it was just that my language had to come up. Yeah, whatever. Lots of people are talented; I ACHIEVE, dammit, was my attitude. This sucked.

Now, luckily, in a perverse way, my junior year had been so extraordinarily bad that I had enough perspective to realize that this was not the end of the world. Being ashamed did not mean I was going to die, or anything. So I studied, and here, too, the university had its own first-rate materials and uncompromising instructors. Still, being in second-year Japanese was sub-par, and I didn’t pass my review. I did great in all my lit classes, though, so it was agreed that I’d be given the chance to reapply the next year, as a new applicant.

There was nothing unfair about this; fully-funded spots in graduate programs are not the sort of thing a department can afford to waste on people who show early signs of not making it through. What they did–this is very Japanophile–was say that since I was already a student who belonged to the university, I’d be supported (not with my grad student funding, but by applying to the Japan Foundation and such) as one to do the next year at an affiliated language program here. In the interim, I could write what would be a master’s thesis. So that’s how I first came to Japan. I spent a year doing a program in scholarly Japanese here–classes about research and reading the newspaper and finally figuring out what the hell the newscasters were saying on NHK. Loved every minute of it, and made friends I still have today.

In that year, it became increasingly obvious that my mentor and I weren’t right for each other. He’s got a stratospheric reputation–it was not his problem. I didn’t really fit the program, and, in his gentlemanly way, he kind of nudged me toward seeing that. At least, that’s the way I interpreted it; one doesn’t exactly talk openly about these things in Japanese departments.

Now that this post is longer than Middlemarch, you may be wondering what exactly, um, the message is. Don’t bother studying Japanese, because you’ll end up being wrong for grad school? No, not that. The message is: study Japanese. It’s an adventure, and it’s bloody hard. Like all adventurous, hard things, it teaches you about yourself and gives you the valuable experience of meeting and mastering obstacles. You can bluff your way through a lot of humanities courses nowadays, but, honey, when you’re studying an Asian language, either you know it or you don’t.

And yet….

Japanese teachers know that they are teaching a subject that foreigners find it hugely difficult to learn. They do their best to be rigorous, but unless you’re the military, you can’t ask people to sit still for 20 hours of instruction for a single course. There’s no way to avoid cutting corners somewhere. That means that, of necessity, much of what they end up testing you on in the first several years comes down to short-term memorizing of lists. They can’t help it. There’s so much to learn that they can’t make even the “cumulative” tests really cumulative. So if you’re a quick study, it’s easy to learn this week’s lesson for Friday’s quiz, cherry pick the things you think are cool enough to retain, and then re-cram everything for the midterms and final. And you won’t even realize you’re doing it, because sometimes, just cramming enough for the final will feel like a medal-worthy feat.

The Piper will show up to dun you eventually, though. You will be in your first class where you’re supposed to read all those boring sentence patterns strung into paragraphs, and those paragraphs strung into a few pages of argument. And you’ll realize you can’t do it. You know most of the kanji, you’ve seen most of the 文型, but it’s not clicking. The ideas aren’t cohering into a main point, even though you can point to just about anything on the page and remember what it means.

Normally, I wouldn’t generalize from my own experience about other people’s weaknesses, but my friends who teach tell me that this is a very common problem among bright Westerners studying Japanese. Part of the thrill is that it’s hard, so you gravitate toward the hard stuff. The easy stuff, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, you’ll remember that. Or, well, you recognize it on sight, which seems good enough, until you try to understand a five-page article in which you have to back-translate every phrase in your head to get what it means.

So here is what you must do: review, obviously, is the first thing. Don’t wait until the next time you’re threatened with a test to go back over p. 23, even though, it’s, like, some stupid thing about when to use はand が. Trust me, p. 23 will come back later to hurt you bad.

But also remember that you can’t learn a language just through classes. Nowadays, with amazon.com, you can get Japanese paperbacks and DVD’s and audio CD’s. I don’t mean language lessons; I mean regular novels and television shows and movies and (heaven help us) J-pops albums. You won’t understand almost anything at first; what you have to do is let it bathe your brain. Get used to the speech cadences, the way things flow. Get used to the way certain verb endings seem to appear in sentences with certain modifying phrases. Don’t worry about learning the rules in the linguistic sense; that’s why you’re taking classes. Worry about getting an intuitive sense of what follows what. That’s the way you think in your native language; you’re constantly hearing traffic signals that give you a sense of what’s coming next without having to be conscious of it. In your first year or so, books are a lost cause, to be blunt. It might be worthwhile to try reading a translation of a novel in English and then seeing whether you can run your eye over the original and get any glimmers of where you are in the plot. You won’t, most of the time. On the other hand, kanji and kana jumbled together will become familiar to your eye, and you’ll be able to practice reading the kana and recognizing kanji radicals, at least. You’ll be moving closer to the day when your eye falls on a page of Japanese and reacts with, “Oh, words,” instead of, “Huh? What are those squiggles?”

By this point, I’m sure I’ve lost just about everyone. Lately, most of my long posts have been due to my switched-off editing function, but this one is different. English will always be my favorite language. It’s my native tongue, in which the founding principles of our country were first articulated, with its blend of modesty and plainspokenness. I consider it an immense gift, which I did nothing to earn, to have been born into a country in which my brain was reared to work in English, not just because of its market value, but because of the thoughts it plants in your head. But Japanese has had thousands of years of relative seclusion to develop into a language of formidable intricacy, subtlety, and power. It’s beautiful, sometimes in that lovely way the world goes ga-ga over, but sometimes with a pleasing roughness that’s not so famous. Japanese is worth learning, and it’s worth learning right, which I’m grateful to have had a second chance to do. You won’t need a second chance if you channel your energies properly the first time.

Okay, a small reward for those who’ve read this far: one of the most touching demonstrations of the way Japanese can use restraint and austerity to tap into large reservoirs of feeling is the best-known haiku by Kobayashi Issa, who lived, as it happens, through the time of the American Revolution. Unlike a lot of the haiku that Westerners take a shine to, this one has nothing quaint about it:

つゆの世は
つゆの世ながら
さりながら
小林一茶

tsuyu no yo ha/tsuyu no yo nagara/sarinagara
Kobayashi Issa

This world of dew
is a world of dew
and yet– and yet–

Kobayashi Issa

That’s not my translation; I don’t know whose it is, but it’s the one you normally see, and for good reason. It doesn’t fit the syllable count, but it conveys the economy with which Issa conveys himself in the original.

The poem was written a month after the early death of his daughter. Buddhism, especially the Japanese strain, encourages an acceptance of the impermanence of life. Well, more like “requires.” Dew is as ubiquitous in classical Japanese as the moon or cherry blossoms; it symbolizes, for obvious reasons, evanescence. Using essentially three concepts (dew, the world, and two related particles that mean something like “while”), he shows how he has not yet resigned himself to his daughter’s death. (There’s also, to me, something of a suggestion of the verb 去る [saru: “to pass”] in the use of the particle さりながら, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it identified as a pivot word, so that interpretation probably isn’t an accepted one.) The different viewpoints and time frames come through, even though the poem could be said not even to be a complete utterance.